Sentence Examples:
They had eyes to see through a maze of red tape and legal mummery to the simple truth that was being hidden or obscured.
Is it such a blessedness to have clerks forever pestering you with bundles of papers in red tape?
I have never met anyone who has carried out this suggestion and do not want the extra weight of red tape in my Rucksack, but it makes one think and realize how much other experienced runners have thought also.
It will make your professional gorge rise to learn that he fastened up the extemporized bandage with red tape, which he got from the writing table after rooting about among the sacred papers in the most ruthless fashion.
The investigation dragged its slow course along, as all such things, encumbered by red tape, do.
They merely charged illegality in the elections and wrapped up the whole situation in the interminable red tape of the law.
With damnable iteration, or break the windows of Government offices in which bewildering regulations were drawn up in miles of red tape.
Furness then tied the slate with red tape, passing the tape longitudinally and transversely around the middle of the slates.
As the pistol sounded, Hiram launched his craft, and amid cheers from the crowd it soared up, and, just clearing the red tape, settled gracefully down a few feet the other side of the two hundred foot line.
Before the report of the pistol had died out, the yellow-winged Dragonfly soared upward from Paul's hand and darted like a streak across the red tape, clearing it at the highest altitude yet achieved by any of the models.
Billy says, for a quick and safe wedding ceremony commend him to an enthusiastic, newly-arrived young missionary; and for rapid handling of red tape connected with a license, pin your faith to a fat and jolly American consul.
It required two days of red tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been the resort hotel of more than one dancing orgy.
As though it's not enough killing the passengers with fumes and stuffiness and drafts, they want to strangle us with red tape, too, damn it all!
His action seemed to indicate that the fighting forces of the North, if free from the trammels of Washington red tape, could, and would, carry on energetic war.
All means to thwart and delay the carrying out of the Government's purposes that the excuses of routine and red tape admitted of would be used by the traitors within the camp to aid the traitors without.
Their scanty resources were calculated to meet the needs of only the crudest life, but upon the threshold of their goal they fell into the red-tape trammels of a civilization older than their own.
The merchant cut the red tape with which it was tied, broke the seal, and opening the package, took therefrom several papers, over which he ran his eyes hurriedly; his clerk, as he did so, turning away.
At the court, he cannot get his documents without much importunity, locomotion, and red tape, and long and tedious delays.
This meant endless red tape, as you may imagine, and endless correspondence with the authorities, and delays and vexations, but finally she got her wish, and the funeral was the most magnificent ever witnessed in that part of the world.
However, red-tape sluggishness managed to retard the decision for several years.
The red tape that had wound itself about the tragedy was thus unloosed at last, and the suffering pair made all haste to get away.
Ask in your own country, where countless thousands of pounds' worth of foodstuffs lie rotting in the warehouses, bound up and tied down with red tape bandages.
Brock, smarting under restraint and handcuffed by red tape, was compelled to look on while the enemy brought up reinforcements, powder, shot, provisions and other munitions of war, by water to Lewiston.
The power to strike which he now visualized came through no intellectual enlargement, no opening up of moral vistas, but only through the discovery that he had on his side a mass of red tape the existence of which he had not previously suspected.
All those strings of red tape, which he had meant to tie with such dilatory cunning hung loose in his grasp; to a Cabinet really set on resignation he could not apply them.
He gets out and does things while these fatheads stay in quarters and untangle red tape.
Behind the head clerk was an enormous room, of which each division was crammed with bundles of papers with an infinite number of tickets hanging from them at the ends of red tape, which give a peculiar physiognomy to law papers.
Belshazzar's costume consists of a purple velvet coat trimmed with gold, a large cloak trimmed with ermine, velvet breeches, white hose crossed with red tape, sandals on the feet, and a velvet and gold crown on the head.
The delay in airplane production was due to the fact that there was too much red tape to be unrolled before actual work was begun.
Several hanks of red tape lay upon the table.
We don't have red tape on shipboard, I can tell you.
They found nothing more of any value; but a piece of paper was discovered, wrapped up in oilskin, and carefully fastened with red tape, in the vest pocket of the dead man.
The front entrance of the hospital being guarded, she could not gain admission; but she had too much resolution, energy and courage, and too much kindness of heart, to be thwarted in her good intentions by red tape.
No appropriation for an object of vital import could be shaken free from its bonds of red tape; and this one was saddled with an incubus, in the bill for the "construction of one hundred gunboats."
For the chairman has his own Red Tape Rats to let loose with which to startle the audience and nobble the Press.
There were marks of snuff on the outside of the manuscript, which was a roll of paper bound with red tape, but there were no marks of snuff on the interior of the manuscript, from which I concluded that he had never opened it.
His Regiment, through some Red-tape informality, has been without tents.
Those who think that duties are light in camp, know nothing of the legions of reports, statements in duplicate and triplicate, required by the too often senseless formalities of red tape.
How contemptibly cruel, in her by no means unusual case, the workings of Red Tape!
It was evident that the millionaire's business had reached such vast proportions that its details were as intricate and absorbing as the government of an empire and that he had found it necessary to protect his person with a network of red tape.
When people begin to handle red tape, there is always a chance that they get enmeshed in its voluminous tangles.
The yearling, confident in his red tape and his mightiness, ordered the plebe out again.
She had remarked that he was keen, active, intelligent, unscrupulous, confident in his own powers, bold as a lion in the wars of quill, parchment, and red tape; without fear, without hesitation, without remorse.
He took a bit of red tape off a bundle of the papers, put it through the eye of the setting, and hung the picture round his neck, inside his clothes, for grannie must not see it.
They lack technical expertise and suffer from corruption, inefficiency, a banking system that does not permit the transfer of moneys, extensive red tape put in place in part to deter corruption, and a Ministry of Finance reluctant to disburse funds.
The police captain exerted himself in a very friendly manner, and owing to the absence of red tape which in an older settlement might have occasioned delay, that same day our Yankee friend was made happy by receiving the sum of fifty pounds.
It is a system typical of the East and its slipshod, rough-and-ready dealings: its great element of simplicity harks back to a life in tents, where red tape was unknown.
I know that for the last five days he has had three thousand drawn out of the bank, changed into notes of a hundred roubles, packed into a large envelope, sealed with five seals, and tied across with red tape.
The splendid manner in which we were supplied with food and clothing convinced us that the business genius and talent for organization of the Empire would sooner or later overcome lack of preparation and "red tape."
I told the story of that in "The Making of an American," and how the red tape of the comptroller's office pointed the way out, after all, with its check for three cents that had gone astray in the purchase of a school site.
By counting up his yesterday's figures, generally, I should say; or else by unrolling a ball of red tape.
Seward was assisted by his chief clerk, who was therefore the quintessence of the wisdom of the foreign affairs, a man not even mastering the red-tape traditions of the department, without any genuine instruction, without ideas.
As the centralization of authority increases, the amount of red-tape piles up until more social energy is consumed in overcoming social inertia and the friction that is the result of social function, than is produced by the function in question.
When I sent the work in, the monster Red Tape intervened in the person of the art editor, who became scarlet with rage because he had not been invoked instead of his colleague, and promptly repudiated the entire contract.
Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape.
It was after hours for getting books, but I made such representations that they cut their red tape for once; and I soon read enough to wonder whether my grave and reverend seignior was quite all there.
Until the Government and society can control the elements, and regulate a spring freshet, a whirlwind or a cyclone, they will find that red tape is not strong enough to hold their ravages in check.
Red tape and the formal pomp of law constitute half its force with women and men of Louisa's caliber.
Simple primitive men do not understand the ways of our circumlocution offices, and they ascribe to duplicity what is really red tape and stupidity.
If, therefore, the layman feels some annoyance at such a controversy over naval red tape, he may have the consolation of knowing that all concerned, admirals and captains, did the right and sensible thing at the time.
A most delightful old porter was my guide, counselor and friend, leading me through the maze of red tape with unfaltering steps.
The hide-bound, red-tape-ridden official was more moved than he would have cared to admit, by a sense of irritation at the placidity of this witness, who was even now almost on his trial.
He was no longer the skeptical hide-bound official: the man, the gentleman, was tearing away at the fetters of red tape.
"Done up in a roll and tied with red tape," repeated Dan, meditatively, opening closet doors and peering into corners, while he tried to keep in his mind an image of the lost chart as described by his fellow searcher.
"I'll trouble you for that packet," he said; and, remorselessly clutching a bundle made up with red tape to resemble a process, he took out a written pleading, to which the signature of a counsel, now ten years in the grave, was appended.
The pet shibboleths of the opponents of the reform were that the system we proposed to introduce would give rise to mere red-tape bureaucracy, and that the reformers were pharisees.
As a soldier and an administrator, though he is rightly called the prince of martinets, yet nothing was more abhorrent to his eyes than red tape.
They do not eat parchment or foolscap or red tape, but they eat the luncheon crumbs.
Charles Dickens has given us an amusing account of an English Circumlocution Office, but English red tape dwindles into insignificance by the side of Spanish red tape.
Red tape might prevent repossession of the original, but he was using his influence to obtain a copy.
It was a dull and dismal afternoon: the rain splashed, the sky came down in gray, vaporous glooms; the red tape was the most cheerful thing in the room.
No nation under the sun is more wedded to shortsightedness and red tape than that which is traditionally supposed to rule the waves.
The difficulties caused by the civil war, and the suspicion with which all foreigners were regarded, proved impossible to surmount without a protracted effort, and submitting to any amount of red tape.
It is rather red tape, and not the occasional snapping of red tape which enfeebles liberty.
Builders hamper themselves by adhering to a red-tape idea that all oarsmen in a boat should be seated at equal distances from each other.
It is needless to enter into the details of the slow process necessary for settling the difficulty, for any one dealing with the affairs of government knows something of the tediousness and red tape required.
It was not easy work to make headway against the seemingly endless array of objections and red tape, but perseverance won out, and the Captain was at last informed, that if he would have his men on hand at four o'clock they would be taken aboard.
It is odd that a people with so much sense of order and red tape should fail so signally to produce an organizer of traffic.
Look at this neat little packet of manuscript; it is paginated, you see, and I have indulged in the civil coquetry of a ribbon of red tape.
This last is a splendid thing, and shows Sir Colin's determination to put the right man in the right place, in spite of all the red tape and seniority systems in the world!
On the other, years of punctilious devotion to the ethics of red tape urged him to deprecate such a cutting of the Gordian knot.
He did everything in his power to expedite matters, but red tape was stronger than gold lace.
They must act without going through the circumlocution of formal discussion and the entanglements of red tape, he told them.
I lost no time in finding the Director, gave my name and yours for surety for my respectability, and, after some delay and red tape, got back my property.
Therefore, happily, unfettered by red tape, and unattached to any naval or military branch of the Service, but merely an experimenter, I intended, at the earliest moment, to put my directive wave to the crucial test.
The record of the termination of this case probably reposes somewhere in the archives, tied in an aged, yellow packet, bound by Spanish red tape.
"I am as well as can be expected," said Sir Simon, grumpily, taking his seat near the table, which was covered with books, and papers, and briefs, and red tape, and all the paraphernalia of legal affairs.
Human wills, intentions and aims, no matter how laudable and well known, are blandly strangled by judicial red tape, and laid away with pompous ceremonial in the dusty catacombs of legal form.
All these remarkable developments, all these delightful ramifications, now lay within the ambit of the red tape which Arthur, left alone, feverishly untied.
Difficult to imagine a better example of the intelligent response, promptitude, and absence of red tape, characteristic of Serbian officials.
He was brimful of quick and generous sympathy and insight; efficient and businesslike, with a delightful sense of humor and absence of red tape, it was always a real pleasure to talk with him.
The country was in a state of turmoil, the Government departments were overladen to a terrible degree, and red tape, far more than now, reigned supreme.
His habits must have been formed in the quiet of an office: he is used to red tape, placidity, and the respect of subordinates.
No red tape nor circumlocution was necessary.
Regulations and even red tape will be seen to have a wise purpose, though, to the end of our days, we may long for some official scissors to cut it.
Union men, enlisted to put down the rebellion, had a way of thinking for themselves, and of making observations of what transpired around them, that was exasperatingly fatal to the regular red-tape idea that a soldier was a machine and nothing more.
It was no easy task to find what they wanted, but at last they chanced on a trig little sloop, of which after considerable bargaining and red tape they became the proud owners.
"He's all of that," remarked Griswold, as he retied the red-tape round the packet of papers.
The performance at Montauk fell far short of the promise and this was aided by the over officiousness of some very young and very fresh officers who had no idea beyond the blind following of red tape regulations no matter what might happen.
The bush-folk love to say that when it opened out its swag in the Territory it found red tape had been forgotten, but having a surplus supply of common sense on hand, it decided to use that in its place.